


you will be an abyss, she said

by aosc



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-04 12:25:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12771030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/aosc
Summary: She stops at a flower stall by the metro entrance on her way from work. She doesn’t get herself roses, and particularly not white ones. Instead, she picks a few pale hydrangeas, punctuated by Salix branches and rosehip, a washed out bouquet that reminds her of reaching over the window sill at home, watching her mother scratch a rake through the grass in their backyard, fallen yellow and orange leaves gathering in small piles across the frozen ground.She cuts all the stalks at a slant, and fills the vase with lukewarm water. She puts it in the center of the kitchen island, all the while pretending that she doesn’t think about putting it instead to rest in her window, and all of the implications that doing so — and thinking of doing so — entails.





	you will be an abyss, she said

**Author's Note:**

> how many fucking kastle-related feelings can you actually, possibly contain within your body?
> 
> well none, the body replied, and vomited all of those feelings out in fic-format

* * *

   
Her heart is beating out of her chest, hitting so fast and so close to her ribs that he has to feel it. She bunches her fingers in his jacket and holds on. Her nails scrape against where somewhere beneath the coarse texture of spun wool, there’s warmth, and skin, and a human being.

 

Frank allows her a split second of limbo when he freezes on the spot, his shoulders going stiff and his breath turning measured. She thinks of what she’s doing, where she is — who he is — before he relaxes. Before she understands that he relaxes, the fight or flight (or both) draining out of him, and he dips his chin to rest in the fit between her neck and her shoulder. It’s quiet, an almost eerie quality to how the air has stopped in her apartment, not as much as a car passing by on the outside. Frank’s palms come up to rest in the curve of her back. She swallows back against where her breath threatens to come out of her in hiccuping increments; against where she realizes just how much of the hope of ever seeing him alive, scars and haunted eyes and deeply gouged hurt and all, has drained out of her until she’d become bloodless with it.

 

She carefully releases him. His breath is quiet but shaped, like it’s being pressed out of him.

 

“It was really good to see you,” she says.

 

It takes him a moment to reply. “Yeah,” he rasps, “Was really good seeing you too.”

 

*

 

The flowers are white roses and dahlias. They’re a little overpowering in smell, distinctly powdery floral that wafts from where they’re drooping in their vase, shielded from immediate sunlight on her coffee table.

 

Karen remembers her mother fussing over similar bouquets; large garden roses clouded by green stalks and eucalyptus leaves, sea holly and chrysanthemums split by olive twigs and snowberry branches. She’d have them in all rooms, different arrangements for different tapestries, different kinds of wooden surfaces and light exposure.

 

She doesn’t know how to tend to them, in truth. So she just sort of, stares at them, petals creasing with wear and stalks going gummy with too much water and too little natural right. She’d removed them from the window after handing over what she’d found on Lieberman. She isn’t sure about whether that’s because she doesn’t want to risk causing a misunderstanding in their one-way communication line, or for some other reason her subconscious doesn’t feel like trusting her with.

 

When she grows weary of herself, the roil of her mind and the constant worry of her thoughts, looping back across the page that is of Frank Castle in title, but whose contents are her own doomsday thoughts and stomach aches, she opens the lid of her laptop. She gets a beer from the fridge, and keys the capsule open against the kitchen sink. She puts her feet up on the tabletop, her toes close enough to nudge the glass vase, and googles for dahlia care instructions in the vain hope of salvaging what’s left of the flowers, not putting too much thought into why.

 

*

 

The wind bites on her cheeks, whips at where her collar dips, where her scarf doesn’t quite reach. The Hudson is snaking deep and dark and bottomless just beneath them.

 

She closes her eyes. She doesn’t bother blinking away more of the tears. She knows that they’ll keep eating on her. The feeling in her throat, like bile but not sour, welling up, won’t go away. The cinch on her lungs — that won’t stop, either.

 

“Karen, I cannot — “ he stops, clears his throat.

 

“Please,” Frank says, his voice cracking down on the vowels, as though he’s unused to using them. Perhaps he is, she thinks, detachedly as he leans towards her. His hands are shoved in his pockets, and she maintains their distance in a manner she’s not sure is resolute or not. There’s a fine line between active participation, and passive acceptance, and Karen wonders at times where both of them toe that line, both in regards to each other and otherwise.

 

His lips are cool on the tip of her cheekbone, chapped and rough.

 

*

 

She salvages three of the roses, once the dahlias have all wilted, their petals gathered in drooping piles at the foot of the vase. She trims the gooey ends of their stalks off, and dries the remainder on a few torn pieces of paper. The edges of the rose petals are starting to brown, to curl inwards with age. Karen dutifully reads up on what she can of flower preservation, however, and refuses to relinquish them to the garbage disposer.

 

She wraps the three surviving flowers in rubber band, pulling them tightly against one another, and ties them hanging upside down from one of her curtain rails in a thin eyelet of translucent sewing thread.

 

She thinks of leaving it at that. At knowing, unless someone at some point walks up to her and tells her otherwise, that Frank’s gone underground again. That he’s MIA, more of a rote instance than the exception to the rule, and that Karen’s knowledge remained a means to an end for him, that he’s used up his chances.

 

She thinks of it through fits of unrest, tossing on the bed, legs tangling in her threadbare sheets. Sluicing through her curtains is the moon, pale yellow and well rounded. She reaches across the mattress, in beneath the cold pillow on her opposite side.

 

Her pulse doesn’t still as much as she’d hoped when her fingertips scrape across the handle of the Sig.

 

*

 

She stops at a flower stall by the metro entrance on her way from work. She doesn’t get herself roses, and particularly not white ones. Instead, she picks a few pale hydrangeas, punctuated by Salix branches and rosehip, a washed out bouquet that reminds her of reaching over the window sill at home, watching her mother scratch a rake through the grass in their backyard, fallen yellow and orange leaves gathering in small piles across the frozen ground.

 

She cuts all the stalks at a slant, and fills the vase with lukewarm water. She puts it in the center of the kitchen island, all the while pretending that she doesn’t think about putting it instead to rest in her window, and all of the implications that doing so — and thinking of doing so — entails.

 

*

 

“The hell’re you doing, Karen? Going after a guy like this?” His voice is tinny across the connection, his teeth evidently grit despite the fact that she can’t see him. If she tries, it’s not difficult; Frank has haunted her, whether that’s in nightmares or in dreams that cross into memories, for months. Scenarios in which she’s reaching for him, hooded and pale, a ghost across a front page, or atop a creaking patio, the shed shuddering with the wind and the collective weight of two men.

 

She rights herself across the forward tilt that her heels cause. She pulls a stray strand of hair to hook behind her ear. “Because he chose me,” she says. It echoes in her head, doubles up in her mouth. She’s been here before. She’s been over this before. The scenario isn’t the same, neither are the people involved — but she’s been here before.

 

Active participation. This is her choice, her pushing back.

 

*

 

She remembers the floral arrangements that spilled over Kev’s closed casket. The cascade of people winding up the aisle, towards the altar, where the darkness is at its fullest, where the light is murky and broken through only by yellow candles lit for the occasion. They’re dramatic, with carnation plaited ivy in long curls over the lid, and oak twigs that have sprouted acorns laying in wreaths to pile on all sides. There are roses, ruby red and all equally large, bunched together by the tens and twenties, proudly erect in brass vases in all cardinal directions. At the foot of the casket is his photo, enlarged and smiling, toothy and proud with his warrior paint ruined by sweat just after the season ender against the MUHS Tigers.

 

She remembers herself at that point; sick of how trapped she’d felt by the small town, where everyone’d come to the funeral, who’d stopped to offer her and her parents their condolences, who’d been over at their house afterwards, crowding her in along with the suffocating sense of never being allowed her grief without a certain sense of acceptance to accompany it.

 

She didn’t want to accept Kev’s death then, and in the moments where she finds herself thinking of it, she isn’t particularly inclined to accept it now, either.

 

Her left eardrum is shattered. The hot leak of blood down the score of her jaw, along with the white noise that whines in her left temple, is telling. She feels the press of Wilson at her back, the frantic beat of his pulse, the rapid bobbing of his throat against the curve of her skull. She pulls herself up and tries to square her shoulders, scrabbles for purchase along the cracked floor whenever Wilson lurches to moving behind her. The rush of adrenaline to her head is dizzying, and there’s a bright light-edge to everything around her; the score over Frank’s ear, pulsing with blood, is sharply red, and his eyes are wide and dark and flickering between her and the man at her back. His knuckles are opened and red, one shoulder unnaturally curving lower than the other.

 

Frank moves forward, and Wilson backs up, frantically slamming his unoccupied arm across her chest. “Don’t you move!” He yells, words forming and transmitting over the thick disconnect of her impaired hearing, “You stay there!”

 

Frank backs up again, his movements cautious, only betrayed by the violent pull of air through his nose, the aborted shudder in his shoulders. Wilson tugs his arm firmer over her ribs. His fingers clutch at the bomb device, white knuckled with stress. Frank’s eyes flicker, once, twice.

 

Karen bites down on her lower lip. Her heart’s fighting to climb out of her mouth. She carefully jostles her right arm. Wilson doesn’t react.

 

She feels it curl up in her gut, the familiar tang of anticipating the moment in which she will pull up just before the precipice. She seeks Frank’s gaze, her breath coming in bursts, in increments, her fingertips slipping over the wires.

 

Frank’s nostrils widen again. The hand that he keeps closest to his waist twitches, as though searching for leverage, or slipping through his tightly wound control. He’s babbling soothingly, allowing for his clipped drawl to become thicker, talking around and towards what Karen is trying to do before it’s all too late.

 

“Now Lewis, you’re a creature of habit if I ever seen one.” Frank straightens up. It’s almost imperceptible; a rote of the body, pulling itself up and easing the breath out of the lungs. His eyes search Karen’s. She winds her fingers around the wire. She thinks that if this is it, Frank’s eyes on hers, pupils dilated to black, a cornered animal, and her — her hand creeping towards the Sig in the bottom of her bag, the wire wet and slippery in her palm, Wilson convulsing with adrenaline-thick breath at her shoulder —

 

“Do it now, Karen!”

 

*

 

She’s shaking so badly when she accepts the gun that she isn’t sure she won’t just drop it at her feet, trigger a misfire and shoot something out with it. She drops it into her bag and sinks back into the wall. She tilts her head sideways, fatigued even if her body won’t admit to feeling it. She’s shivering with cold despite feeling sweat sliding down her neck and pooling in the low of her back.

 

Frank’s barely standing, his weight quelled by his knees, but only just. His head is bowed, gaze temporarily unseeing. Karen reaches out anyway, more on rote than by desire, and mostly to be able to ground herself in the fact that she is here, and perhaps that he, also, is here.

 

He looks up. He leans, or tips, incrementally, towards her. She releases the shudder of a breath that she hasn’t realized she’s been holding. It rocks her, expands her ribs beneath where her skin is bruised, where she’s pulled a muscle or two from the blast and from stray pelts of concrete and steel.

 

The shrill ring of the elevator shuddering to a halt registers from far away with her. Frank pushes himself to his feet, swaying a little as he does, and relocates to beneath the elevator shaft trap door. She’d never have imagined that she’d see him like this; taut across tenterhooks, counting on some unholy amount of bottled up mental strength to save him when his legs should go out.

 

“Frank — “ she says, encompassing all and everything; the piece of shrapnel that is lodged just above his elbow, the tilt to his upper body, the slackness to his jaw.

 

He sinks into the space she occupies as easy as falling through water. His shirt is sharp with glass fiber and chalk, torn in places, wet with blood. She grips at his upper arm anyway, the sensation registering dimly in her ruined palm. Frank’s eyes shutter, a barely there sweep of dark eyelashes. Karen thinks that if she’s as selfishly honest with herself as she never is, they’d deserve the time it would take for her to count them all singularly.

 

Frank tilts his head, parts his lips as though he’s about to say something then, before he thinks better of it. He looks up at her. She closes her eyes. Swallows against the tightness in her throat that doesn’t have much at all to do with the fact that she’s almost died. She doesn’t think, anyway. It feels inconsequential, another box to tick, a risk she will have to take and to accept. A risk that doesn’t weigh up against the internal fight that Frank has just lost to himself, she thinks, as he leans his forehead into hers, slots something inexplicable but irrevocably true, home, to settle between them.

 

Karen holds her breath against the push in her chest, the roil of sadness that threatens to overwhelm her, here, push out and encompass them like a tangible, physical thing.

 

She steps back. At the back her mind she registers that they’ve been in here for far too long. The part of the hind brain that sends her the impulse of fight or flight is telling them to _leave_.

 

“Go,” she says, swiping at the blurry edge to her vision.

 

Frank goes, blinking slowly, as though awoken from deep sleep, his body reacting where his mind doesn’t seem to. “Take care,” he says, consolidating a promise that she has to try and keep for the both of them.

 

*

 

She maintains the habit of keeping flowers around the apartment. She doesn’t put them in the window, but she buys them. Different bouquets from different vendors. Flowers depending on season, volume and color array on her mood. She doesn’t really pretend that she learns much, or that she becomes a devout botanist, or anything, but at least they’re — there.

 

Foggy comes over one evening, for pad thai from the place on 57th, a few beers, and some consulting on a digging she’s done into a couple of B&E’s from a few years back that have gone unsolved, a pile of case files at the bottom of the NYPD’s priority list since Hell’s Kitchen was hurled into the whorl of recent catastrophes.

 

He indicates the bouquet, raising an eyebrow. “I see we haven’t talked enough these past few months.”

 

Karen hands him one of the beers. “That, unfortunately, is for me, from me.”

 

Foggy’s eyes pinch in the way that they only do when he’s trying to determine whether you’re to be believed or not. “Uh huh,” he says, not wholly convinced.

 

Karen rolls her eyes. “Okay,” she says, “Would any guy _you_ know buy these kinds of flowers for a date?”

 

Foggy turns his speculative gaze towards the flowers again. He eyes it for a few silent moments. “Fair enough,” he concludes, after a while, “I don’t know what any of those are, so probably not,” he turns to her again, raising the flask to swallow a mouthful of Miller all the while, “Unless you’re dating a florist.”

 

“A florist who really takes his chances,” Karen says.

 

Foggy hums, “Okay, true,” he peers closer at the vase, “Can you eat that? Is that a thing? Putting food in your flowers?”

 

“It’s ornamental kale,” Karen corrects, more on rote than out of any actual desire to do so.

 

Foggy snorts. “Right.” He pulls one of the containers towards himself. “So, uh, you okay? There’s nothing — “ he hesitates, thumbing at the lid, “You’re okay?”

 

Karen chuckles. “Yeah, Foggy,” she says. She pokes about the noodles until she finds a piece of tofu. “Really. I didn’t realize we were doing therapy hour.”

 

“Psh, you wish,” Foggy says. He sobers equally quickly. “No I’m, just wondering. All that business with Castle last month and — I mean, we’re up to our eyeballs swimming in that, complete, shitfest.” He cinches a few strings of noodles between his chopsticks. “I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”

 

Karen licks her bottom lip. She glances at the flowers; ornamental red cabbage, oak leaves and white garden roses. It’s fresh, just from this afternoon. It occupies its usual spot in the midst of the kitchen island. Nowhere near the window. Realistically, she’s aware of the fact that Frank’s in the wind. That the flowers on the window sill-thing ended once she’d thrown most of the original ones out.

 

But she doesn’t want to put out a fresh batch to languish in the light and find out that inevitably, it’s not six white roses that tether Frank’s life to hers. That no matter the amount of days she allows for them to sit there and soak up what little sun befalls New York in December, he’s not going to show up, looming and pale, freshly bruised and hurting.

 

She’s enough of an adult to realize that it’s what she wants; to dig her fingers into where betrayal, and grief, and loss, have gouged deep welts into Frank Castle, and find out all there is to know about it. To press and prod and be a part of the narrative that made him that way.

 

Karen thinks that perhaps she’s not ready yet to accept that it’s not particularly healthy, nor reasonable, aspirations to have in life.

 

“Karen?”

 

She jolts out of her own thoughts. She pulls a breath. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m okay.”

 

Foggy frowns, “You sure?”

 

Karen remembers: the heavy dislocate of the door as Brett Mahoney’s men, in Kevlar vests and helmets, carrying automatics hoisted before themselves, go through it. She looks to Frank. They have a split second’s worth of time, of deciding how to get him out of here in anything but a hearse.

 

The weight of the Sig in her palm is solid, metal warm against the raw scrapes. She holds it out for him.

 

Frank doesn’t hesitate. He accepts the gun, and moves around her. He fits himself carefully to the track of her spine, winding an arm from her hip up across her chest, lodging the muzzle beneath her chin. “Easy,” he murmurs, as though he’s talking her across an unsteady path across water. As though he’s teaching her how to place the gun strategically here, talking her through the bullet’s designation: through her jaw, the roof of her mouth, her skull.

 

“Okay,” she whispers, and leans into him. He doesn’t give. His breath is quiet, barely felt in his chest, only as controlled puffs that rustle her hair.

 

She’s aware of the fact that there is nothing for her to melt down of herself, to remake what he’s lost. She can’t trace down his wounds and fit herself into the places where he needs it the most. Not as the man he was, anyway.

 

“Yeah,” she says, pushing the memory away, down, “I promise, Foggy. I’m okay.”

 

He nods. After a few beats, he slants her a smile. “Alright,” he concedes.

 

*

 

She stays up even after Foggy’s gone, taken their empty cartons of food and beers with him and threatened her in a very friendly manner to call him for spontaneous hangouts more often, Kare, seriously.

 

She changes out of her clothes, swipes her hair up and twists it into a whorl at the base of her neck. She tugs on a sweatshirt she thinks belongs to Foggy, or Matt, originally. It says Columbia on it in block letters, and the slub cotton is washed out and soft.

 

She flicks the light switch in the kitchen, and brings the vase over to the sink.

 

She separates the roses from the remainder of the bouquet. She cuts the stalks a little more, because the other vase is the tallest she owns. She gets a glass, its faded print of a Sam Adams holiday edition that she’d nicked on some stupid bar crawl a few years back. It’s pint tall, and will do. She taps it up with water and places the roses in it.

 

The moon’s obscured tonight, the sky an overcast, dark grey. The street light closest to her has gone out, and it forces the alley below into unnatural dark, shadowed by the lamps farther out. There’s not much in the way of life outside.

 

She still checks in both directions, however, and is unsure of whether it’s due to paranoia, or tragically misplaced hope, as she puts the glass of roses out on the window sill.

 

*

**Author's Note:**

> this fic mostly exists bc i thought frank got karen a bouquet of flowers, instead of a pot of roses. i went back and rewatched the scene whilst writing this, realized the error of my ways, but decided to fuck canon and swing it. title from a roberto bolaño poem.
> 
> i am on [tumblr](http://www.ddelline.tumblr.com) if you want to come yell at and/or with me about fandom, kastle, general stuff, et cetera.


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